Newsletter automation is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity for growth. Brit + Co, one of the largest lifestyle media brands in the US, knows this well. With a highly engaged community of over 175 million people and major partnerships, maximizing audience attention is the top priority.
But with traffic from social media becoming unpredictable, Brit + Co decided to double down on their newsletter offering. The challenge was simple: to reverse low subscriber engagement combined and reduce a heavy, manual workflow. And, the solution they desperately needed was newsletter automation.
😩 The pain point: When 3 hours a week kills optimization
Brit + Co is a lean team, producing around 150 pieces of content and hundreds of social assets weekly. The manual demands of newsletter creation were a major drain on time and energy.
Jemal Swoboda, Brit + Co’s VP of Product and Growth, told us about the old system: “I’d used our previous email solution for probably almost a decade and a half. What we started noticing, though, was that the cost was really amping up, and it was a very manual process with the newsletters needing to be rebuilt each time.”
Swoboda estimates staff spent around three hours every single week just on newsletter assembly. This manual effort meant they had no time for strategic optimization, and engagement remained low (around a 30% open rate). For a publisher that relies on engaged users, newsletter automation was the only way to reclaim this time.
🧠 The game-changer: Achieving ‘set it and forget it’ newsletter automation
Brit + Co turned to Echobox to implement sophisticated newsletter automation.
Their goal was clear: “What we wanted to create was a situation where you can set it and forget it, with some curation as needed. We needed to help take some of the workload off of our small team. Echobox has really helped in that way.”
The new process is simple: Brit + Co connects their content feeds to Echobox, allowing the platform to automate the creation and sending of 80% of their newsletters.
A reduced workload is only half the story. Echobox is constantly analyzing engagement data, building a detailed picture of each individual subscriber. In fact, it tailors every single send—from content order to personalized send times—to maximize open and click rates. This advanced newsletter automation ensures that every hour saved also translates into higher performance.
🥳 The big win: Sky-high open rates
The implementation delivered stunning results, proving the power of smart newsletter automation:
| Key Performance Metric | The Improvement |
| Open Rate (from 30%) | A phenomenal 50% Increase (now consistently 40-50%) |
| Time Spent on Newsletter Creation | Slashed by 89% (down from 3 hours to 20 minutes weekly) |
That 89% reduction translates to over 10 hours saved per month, which the lean team can now spend on content creation and strategic initiatives.
Swoboda trusts the process completely: “For me, being able to trust Echobox’s automation is huge. Now I know that if I can do the work on our side it can be really effective.”
The final word on moving to automated workflows? “100%. I would highly recommend it. It takes a little bit of trust and having an open mind that it’s going to be a new process. But ultimately it will save you a lot of time.” (Discover more about the platform features on the Echobox product page).
